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A Decade of Slug

terathon.com

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: A Decade of Slug

#51
post #44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stack are those people using?

He has a post up: https://terathon.com/blog/radical-pie.html I'm pretty confident the "stack" is C++ on Win32, with a bunch of hand-rolled libraries and no stdlib.

Will probably run great in Proton.

Re: A Decade of Slug

#52
So nice to see this here. The author's books are awesome resources for graphics and C++. It's a shame there seem to be fewer print editions available these days!?

Re: A Decade of Slug

#53
I am not at all familiar with game development. This article reminds me of Casey Muratori mentioning a font issue in game development environment from a random podcast. On web, you can just fetch a google font whatever. No problem. On a local machine, you tend to look a well-established software like harfbuzz. But then harfbuzz could be rather a big dependency. A game is self-contained and you want your font looks cool and unique to your game, like the Diablo font. So it becomes a design issue. It's an awesome approach to let GPU render fonts. I cannot imagine how many game devs had font issues where they realized that they might have to learn how to render fonts as well not just characters and grass.

Re: A Decade of Slug

#54
post #53

I am not at all familiar with game development. This article reminds me of Casey Muratori mentioning a font issue in game development environment from a random podcast. On web, you can just fetch a google font whatever. No problem. On a local machine, you tend to look a well-established software like harfbuzz. But then harfbuzz could be rather a big dependency. A game is self-contained and you want your font looks co…

> well-established software like harfbuzz

Harfbuzz is only one piece of the puzzle, it's not a text renderer, only a 'text shaper' (e.g. translating a sequence of UNICODE codepoints into a sequence of glyphs). The actual font handling and text rendering still needs to be done by some other code (e.g. the readme in Mikko Mononen's Skribidi project gives a good overview about what's needed besides the actual rendering engine: https://github.com/memononen/Skribidi/)

Re: A Decade of Slug

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was granted a patent for the Slug algorithm in 2019, and I legally have exclusive rights to it until the year 2038. But I think that’s too long. The patent has already served its purpose well, and I believe that holding on to it any longer benefits nobody. Therefore, effective today, I am permanently and irrevocably dedicating the Slug patent to the public domain.

Yes, now that SDF font rendering is the industry's preference, he drops the software patent. That is, he is dropping the patent because it isn't a commercially viable piece of software, not because he is ethically opposed to it. Great virtue signaling though.

SDF font rendering was common long before Slug, and Slug is supposed to be the better solution (I haven't used it though, so cannot comment on its pros and cons vs SDF, but one obvious disadvantage of SDF is that you still need a font atlas texture, and that can get very big if you need to render some East Asian character sets).

Re: A Decade of Slug

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, now that SDF font rendering is the industry's preference, he drops the software patent. That is, he is dropping the patent because it isn't a commercially viable piece of software, not because he is ethically opposed to it. Great virtue signaling though.

SDF rendering is just a fuzzy blobby approximation.

For that it works surprisingly well though, unless you need tiny text.

Re: A Decade of Slug

#57
post #53

I am not at all familiar with game development. This article reminds me of Casey Muratori mentioning a font issue in game development environment from a random podcast. On web, you can just fetch a google font whatever. No problem. On a local machine, you tend to look a well-established software like harfbuzz. But then harfbuzz could be rather a big dependency. A game is self-contained and you want your font looks co…

[deleted]

Re: A Decade of Slug

#58

Amazing, Thank you Eric!! Also, Microsoft's Loop-Blinn patent for cubic curves will expire on March 25. These might change the landscape of text rendering...

I thought loop-blinn expired a while ago, or is the cubic curves separate from quadratic?

Re: A Decade of Slug

#60

Amazing, Thank you Eric!! Also, Microsoft's Loop-Blinn patent for cubic curves will expire on March 25. These might change the landscape of text rendering...

I thought loop-blinn expired a while ago, or is the cubic curves separate from quadratic?

IIRC their patent is mainly for cubic curve filling. It's still in effect: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7564459B2/en
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